Category: Uncategorized

Ramen Bloggers

Ramen bloggers aren’t just passive observers of the noodle soup phenomenon: to be a ramen writer of Kamimura’s stature, you need to live in a ramen town, and there is unquestionably no town in Japan more dedicated to ramen than Fukuoka. This city of 1.5m along the northern coast of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s 4 main islands, is home to 2000 ramen shops, representing Japan’s densest concentration of noodle-soup emporiums. While bowls of ramen are like snowflakes in Japan, Fukuoka is known as the cradle of tonkotsu, a pork-bone broth made milky white by the deposits of fat and collagen extracted during days of aggressive boiling. It is not simply a specialty of the city; it is the city, a distillation of all its qualities and calluses. Tare is the flavour base that anchors each bowl, that special potion – usually just 30 ml of concentrated liquid – that bends ramen into 1 camp or another. In Sapporo, tare is made with miso. In Tokyo, soy sauce takes the lead. At enterprising ramen joints, you’ll find tare made with up to 24 ingredients, an apothecary’s stash of dried fish and fungus and esoteric add-ons. The objective of tare is essentially the core objective of Japanese food itself: to pack as much umami as possible into every bite.

Put that there

In 1979, MIT professor Christopher Schmandt and colleagues developed “Put That There,” a voice and gesture interactive system, in the Architecture Machine Group (that later evolved into the famed MIT Media Lab)(Put That There) allows a user to build and modify a graphical database on a large format video display. The goal of the research is a simple, conversational interface to sophisticated computer interaction. Natural language and gestures are used, while speech output allows the system to query the user on ambiguous input.

Deep Maneuver

The earliest example of robotic deep maneuver I’ve found is an operation from WW2 called Fu-Go. Fu-Go was the Japanese attempt to bomb the continental US using balloon bombs. Although Fu-Go was a complete failure, I find it useful as a way to think productively about how robotic intelligence can be used to surmount physical challenges (distance, time, etc.). This intelligence would allow them to leverage a wide variety of environmental factors to extend mission duration and range, from using wind/ocean currents to hitchhiking on vehicles (ships, trucks, aircraft, etc.) to slow self-propulsion using solar energy (or buoyancy).

Transhumanist platform

if you are looking for 21st century, as opposed to 19th or 20th century political platforms.

The Transhumanist Party and Zoltan Istvan’s US Presidential campaign is politically-
centric. It aims to support voters with future-inspired policies that will enrich America and
the world. We believe science and technology can solve most of the world’s problems.

  1. Implement a Transhumanist Bill of Rights mandating government support of longer lifespans via science and technology
  2. Spread a pro-science culture by emphasizing reason and secular values
  3. Create stronger government policies to protect against existential risk (including artificial intelligence, plagues, asteroids, climate change, and nuclear warfare and disaster)
  4. Provide free education at every level; advocate for mandatory preschool and college education in the age of longer lifespans
  5. Create a flat tax for everyone
  6. Advocate for morphological freedom (the right to do anything to your body so long as it doesn’t harm others)
  7. Advocate for real-time democracy using available new technologies
  8. End costly drug war and legalize mild recreational drugs like marijuana
  9. Create government where all politician’s original professions are represented equally (the government should not be run by 40% lawyers when lawyers represent only 10% of the country’s jobs)
  10. Significantly lessen massive incarcerated population in America by using innovative technologies to monitor criminals outside of prison
  11. Strongly emphasize green tech solutions to make planet healthier
  12. Support and draft logistics for a Universal Basic Income
  13. Reboot the space program with significantly increased government resources
  14. Develop international consortium to create a “Transhumanist Olympics”
  15. Develop and support usage of a cranial trauma alert chip that notifies emergency crews of extreme trauma (this will significantly reduce domestic violence, crime, and tragedy in America)
  16. Work to use science and technology to be able to eliminate all disabilities in humans
  17. Insist on campaign finance reform, limit lobbyist’s power, and include 3rd political parties in government
  18. Create a scientific and educational industrial complex in America instead of a military industrial complex. Spend money on wars against cancer, heart disease, and diabetes—not on wars in far-off countries